Fastest running CyberStorm Mk III?

[johnklos]

I've just recently gotten my CyberStorm Mk III repaired as described here:

http://amiga.serveftp.net/Cyberstorm_socket.html

At the same time I got a 71E41J mask m68060 (.32 micron as compared with .6) which runs MUCH cooler. I've read that this version can be run as high as 100 MHz:

http://www.powerphenix.com/CT60/english/welcome.htm

When I tried to run the CyberStorm with a 100 MHz oscillator, the CPU works - the power LED stays solid for a while, then flashes quickly - but apparently the memory or the rest of the board isn't fast enough because it doesn't get farther than this.

I have 50ns memory installed, and it works fine set to 60ns while running the CPU at 80 MHz, but I'm curious if anyone's had any success running a Mk III faster than 80 MHz, and if so, how.

Any ideas, anyone?

[Gulliver]

So you mean you want to overclock it to the extreme

Suggestions for stretching your overclocking chances:
1-Make a volt mod, the 68060 can tolerate an absolute maximum 4.5 volts as supply
2-Put heatsinks and coolers working at high speed, not only on the processor, but also to the accompanying glue chipset of your CyberStorm. The more extra chips you cool the more likely the CyberStorm will tolerate overclocking.
3-Get a stable PSU, a PC one with at least 2 times the watts than the power consumed by your entire system, to ensure voltage stability at all times.
4-Overclock bit by bit. This means, dont go for 100mhz at one shot. Try 80, 85, 90, 95 and then 100mhz
5-When overclocking a 68060 the first component that will fail will be the built in FPU. So get a proper fpu test/benchmark and use it while you clock up your CyberStorm to ensure you are getting a stable system.
6-Dont forget to have your setup in a proper ventilated case, otherwise cooling will be useless.
7-If you got the money and the will, you can also try some water cooling setup
8-If you have plenty of money, use phase change cooling for the best results. If not you may also hack a beer mini-fridge for your CyberStorm. When using this type of cooling, remember to protect the cpu/chips by putting a heater near the cpu/chip to avoid condensation.

Bottomline: Overclocking to the extremes is half science and half art. Your mileage will allways vary.

Good luck!

[delshay]

So you mean you want to overclock it to the extreme

Suggestions for stretching your overclocking chances:
1-Make a volt mod, the 68060 can tolerate an absolute maximum 4.5 volts as supply
2-Put heatsinks and coolers working at high speed, not only on the processor, but also to the accompanying glue chipset of your CyberStorm. The more extra chips you cool the more likely the CyberStorm will tolerate overclocking.
3-Get a stable PSU, a PC one with at least 2 times the watts than the power consumed by your entire system, to ensure voltage stability at all times.
4-Overclock bit by bit. This means, dont go for 100mhz at one shot. Try 80, 85, 90, 95 and then 100mhz
5-When overclocking a 68060 the first component that will fail will be the built in FPU. So get a proper fpu test/benchmark and use it while you clock up your CyberStorm to ensure you are getting a stable system.
6-Dont forget to have your setup in a proper ventilated case, otherwise cooling will be useless.
7-If you got the money and the will, you can also try some water cooling setup
8-If you have plenty of money, use phase change cooling for the best results. If not you may also hack a beer mini-fridge for your CyberStorm. When using this type of cooling, remember to protect the cpu/chips by putting a heater near the cpu/chip to avoid condensation.

Bottomline: Overclocking to the extremes is half science and half art. Your mileage will allways vary.

Good luck!

you forgat a couple of things

it's not all about PSU watts,it's also the PSU connections. as you lose voltage if all of the GND and 5v wires are not connected and should be kept short as possible to the PCB.

anyway here with EXTREME speeds the logic chips need voltage near their operating voltage ie 5v if it jrops to say 4.92 4.93 it starts to lock-up to be safe it must read 4.98 and above. the voltage reading must be take from the PCB ie the GND probe must not be connected to the frame but on the PCB itself along with positive probe to get a TRUE reading of the voltage on the PCB.

SIMMS

this also plays a important factor and most simms will fail even if it reads 50ns.

someone here on amiga.org said whats marked on the outside does not mean what on the inside,well he was right (he knows who he is).

i have here SIMM which is marked 60ns,but it is *not true*,it's infact 43ns which allows me to overclock pass 80MHz.

this may or may not effect all PHASE5 cards but i can say for the first time Blizzard PPC cards can operate at 80Mhz+.

68060 on **my** Blizzard PPC card has reached 80Mhz and passed 24Hr test and i don't thing this is the limit and im almost sure it will go faster as i have the correct simm for this kind of speed.

there are other things thats also stopping cards operating at EXTREME speeds which im not going into.

[matthey]

I have a CSMK3 with 68060@75MHz. I use 50ns marked EDO SIMMs. I have a very fast and stable system at this speed. I do not overclock the motherboard or SCSI, just the 68060 with a 2nd oscillator. I changed a jumper to do this. It's described here...

http://members.iinet.net.au/~davem2/overclock/csppc.html

I tried 80MHz and the system booted but was not completely stable. I didn't think the problem was the 68060 (newest mask). It could have been the ram being too slow but I doubt that even. I can set the memory speed up in the CS boot menu at 75 MHz but it didn't help to have it at the slower speed at 80 MHz. I figured the limit of the CS circuitry had been reached. Good luck going farther and let me know if you have any luck.

[delshay]

that link shows how to build a socket,but i dont like that idea.

the problem is when the CPU is going to be removed it can put a lot of stress on the outer pins and can or may removed the pads from the PCB.

a proper socket will add strength to all the pins and work together but if you are going to fit the latest mask why bother with a socket.

from what iv seen and my point of veiw 060 sockets is a bad idea and cause more problems,so any of my future projects will not include 060 sockets.

[johnklos]

that link shows how to build a socket,but i dont like that idea.

the problem is when the CPU is going to be removed it can put a lot of stress on the outer pins and can or may removed the pads from the PCB.

a proper socket will add strength to all the pins and work together but if you are going to fit the latest mask why bother with a socket.

from what iv seen and my point of veiw 060 sockets is a bad idea and cause more problems,so any of my future projects will not include 060 sockets.

Unfortunately, there's no way to solder an m68060 directly since the circuit board isn't through-pin - the socket is surface mounted. If you read the repair link, you'll see that they recommend building up the socket because there's no way to get underneath it.

If you think soldering the chip directly is a better idea, though, why would removal of the m68060 from the socket be a reason to support that? If the chip is soldered, then you can't swap it for any reason. If you have a socket, you just have to be very careful if you do swap it... but I don't have any reason whatsoever to ever change it since it's the latest / last mask.

[johnklos]

Suggestions for stretching your overclocking chances:
1-Make a volt mod, the 68060 can tolerate an absolute maximum 4.5 volts as supply
2-Put heatsinks and coolers working at high speed, not only on the processor, but also to the accompanying glue chipset of your CyberStorm. The more extra chips you cool the more likely the CyberStorm will tolerate overclocking.
3-Get a stable PSU, a PC one with at least 2 times the watts than the power consumed by your entire system, to ensure voltage stability at all times.
4-Overclock bit by bit. This means, dont go for 100mhz at one shot. Try 80, 85, 90, 95 and then 100mhz
5-When overclocking a 68060 the first component that will fail will be the built in FPU. So get a proper fpu test/benchmark and use it while you clock up your CyberStorm to ensure you are getting a stable system.
6-Dont forget to have your setup in a proper ventilated case, otherwise cooling will be useless.
7-If you got the money and the will, you can also try some water cooling setup
8-If you have plenty of money, use phase change cooling for the best results. If not you may also hack a beer mini-fridge for your CyberStorm. When using this type of cooling, remember to protect the cpu/chips by putting a heater near the cpu/chip to avoid condensation.

A lot of good suggestions. Most of these I already addressed:

1: decided against that, as this is in a colocated server and stability is more important than speed.
2: have little heat sinks on the chips under the SIMMs, too, since they do get ridiculously hot, and I have a fan moving air across (front of Amiga to back) the entire board.
3: even though I have the stock power supply, I've replaced some of the older components in it because of testing it at full load, put in a variable speed fan, removed a couple of metal fins on the back, and reduced the total power of the system significantly. It used to have a CyberStorm PPC, two 10,000 RPM UltraSCSI drives, and one 7,200 RPM IDE drive. Now it has just one 2 TB 5,900 RPM low power drive.
4: I either have to source some more oscillators between 80 and 100 MHz or I need to build a variable speed clock generator.
5: Good idea. I have been running some FPU-intensive programs to test it.
6: I spent a good bit of time improving ventilation and making sure there are no hot spots inside.
7: Too complicated and not enough space. Also, what would I cool? The CPU at 80 MHz and 100% load is still so cool with the ventilation that you can barely tell it's warmer than when it's off.
8: Same thing. Might be useful for the CyberStorm PPC since the 604e gets damned hot and it's got an original mask m68060.

Thanks! I'll let you know how it goes.

[delshay]

Unfortunately, there's no way to solder an m68060 directly since the circuit board isn't through-pin - the socket is surface mounted. If you read the repair link, you'll see that they recommend building up the socket because there's no way to get underneath it.

If you think soldering the chip directly is a better idea, though, why would removal of the m68060 from the socket be a reason to support that? If the chip is soldered, then you can't swap it for any reason. If you have a socket, you just have to be very careful if you do swap it... but I don't have any reason whatsoever to ever change it since it's the latest / last mask.

this is why the CPU should be solder in direct by a expert,to stop users changing the CPU via a socket as it's surface mounted. if you keep changing CPU sooner or later you will damage the pads on the PCB.

if a socket must be mounted removing the bottom part of the pin (thin part) and solder a proper complete socket just like how the old socket was removed. but i don't recommend a socket for this PCB as to many changes of CPU may damage the pads.

that type of PCB is better off with the latest mask soldered in direct.

[Damion]

It might be possible to run the bus at 1/2 CPU clock (like the Apollo cards easily can), check the 68060 docs for how this is supposed to be done. 100MHz should be entirely possible then, without stressing the rest of the card.

Aside from that, an Apollo 4060 is easily overclocked, with a Fastlane or 4091 you'd still have decent SCSI, too.

[johnklos]

if a socket must be mounted removing the bottom part of the pin (thin part) and solder a proper complete socket just like how the old socket was removed. but i don't recommend a socket for this PCB as to many changes of CPU may damage the pads.

Why not just put the CPU in the socket and leave it?

[amigadave]

With the scarcity of good accelerator cards for the Amiga, I would be too worried about ruining either of my Phase5 CyberStorm PPC cards or CyberVision graphics cards by overclocking them.  That plus the fact that there are so few repair shops that will work on them if I do damage mine and parts are getting harder to find to make any repairs.

I will settle for 50MHz 68060 and 233MHz 604e PPC and just hope that they both last for several more years as I wait for MorphOS2.x, AmigaOS4.x and AROS to continue to get faster, better and have more software written specifically for them that will eventually cause me to retire, or sell my big box Classic Amiga computers and only use my PC, or MacBook with AmigaForever/WinUAE/AmiKit, and/or GBA1000 (if/when I ever get it completed), and/or A500+ w/GVP A530, and/or MiniMig (if/when I ever get it completed), and/or upgraded CDTV w/50MHz 68030+6882+32mb RAM, and/or A1200/50MHz 68060/256mb RAM/SCSI-2/Subway USB/IDE-to-CompactFlash 8gb internal drive, to relive the fun of playing all those old Classic Amiga games, unless I run E-UAE on my 1.5GHz G4 MacMini running MorphOS2.4 and just get rid of everything else once and for all.  (never happen, it is incredibly hard to part with all this old hardware that has given so many good memories for so long a period of time, hard to choose which Amigas to get rid of and which to keep, but why do any of us need more than one computer, or one desktop and one laptop?)

[Castellen]

that link shows how to build a socket,but i dont like that idea.

the problem is when the CPU is going to be removed it can put a lot of stress on the outer pins and can or may removed the pads from the PCB.

When I designed that concept of a PGA socket using individual pin sockets, I did consider the stress on the pads. The Precidip part no. 714-87-164-31-012 data states the removal force as 0.4 N (typical) for each pin.  Any one pad is easily strong enough to tolerate this upward force.

Not sure why you mentioned that the outer pins would have more stress applied to them, are you not using a PGA extraction tool?  Most of these tools apply *downward* force to the outer pins, so if anything, these are under the least stress during removal.

As it has already been mentioned, it would be best to be able to solder the CPU directly to the board (higher reliability and it lessens the chances of the average punter messing with it), but obviously you can't do this due to the BGA footprint.

Unless you have access to a BGA replacement station and an X-ray machine to inspect the final joints, replacing the socket with a BGA type is not really an option.

If you have a suggestion of how to improve my socket implementation, I'm certainly open for ideas.

Advantages of individual pin sockets:
- Easy to obtain
- Each joint can be 100% visually inspected
- Unsoldered joints are obvious (the pin falls off)
- No specialised equipment required to fit them

The disadvantage is that it's crutial to align each socket perfectly, which takes a high degree of soldering ability.

Make a volt mod, the 68060 can tolerate an absolute maximum 4.5 volts as supply

Where did you find that detail?  The 68060 datasheet I have specifies the maximum supply as 4.0V.  [Section 12.1 - Maximum Ratings - Supply Voltage]  Have you checked the supply voltage range of the other devices on the board which are powered from the 3.3V regulator?

with EXTREME speeds the logic chips need voltage near their operating voltage ie 5v if it jrops to say 4.92 4.93 it starts to lock-up to be safe it must read 4.98 and above

The supply to a CMOS device (and it's temperature) affects the propagation delay through the device and the output transition time.  If you're talking about 50mV power supply variation before problems occur, it doesn't sound like a usable situation.  Even good power supplies are specified for a load regulation of 3-5%.  So best case, you need to expect a supply between 4.85 and 5.15V.

With the scarcity of good accelerator cards for the Amiga, I would be too worried about ruining either of my Phase5 CyberStorm PPC cards or CyberVision graphics cards by overclocking them. That plus the fact that there are so few repair shops that will work on them if I do damage mine and parts are getting harder to find to make any repairs.

Thanks, the best statement so far.  I've lost track of the number of Cyberstorm boards I've repaired, only to get an Email back a few weeks later saying that the owner has overclocked it (against my advice) and the board no longer boots.  You don't get a second chance after you've killed the programmable logic, the images to program new ones are not available, so you can kiss your hardware goodbye.



Why is it that device manufactures go to great lengths to generate operating parameters and limits??  So that you can operate the thing without killing it!

[delshay]

when the pads go though a heat cycle (ie solder/resolder) it's not the same strength/bonding to the PCB.

when a new CPU is inserted force will be put on all the pins left,right,up,down and can damage the pads as there may be movement not on the pin(s) but the suface mounted pads itself in-effect tearing it from the PCB,this is why the *plastic housing* is inportant as all pins will work together.

so it's not just when you removing a CPU it's also when you insert it and it applies to all the pins not just the outer.

[alexh]

The Cyberstorm MKIII can have it's firmware told to run more (or less) wait states on the DRAM controller. Once set (I think it might even be stored in NVRAM) it should be possible to overclock higher than standard.

I think you need a combination of Phase5 cpu060 and setmemmode

[delshay]

Unfortunately, there's no way to solder an m68060 directly since the circuit board isn't through-pin - the socket is surface mounted. If you read the repair link, you'll see that they recommend building up the socket because there's no way to get underneath it.

If you think soldering the chip directly is a better idea, though, why would removal of the m68060 from the socket be a reason to support that? If the chip is soldered, then you can't swap it for any reason. If you have a socket, you just have to be very careful if you do swap it... but I don't have any reason whatsoever to ever change it since it's the latest / last mask.

there are other reasons why a socket should not be used which im not going into.but why do need a socket if you have the latest mask,what would be the reason to swap a 68060. how offten do their go faulty.

from my point of veiw 060 socket should be left for TESTING purpose only.